I love the sea, which is why I live on a beach. Seascape sunsets have seared superlative visions into my mind. So in the Nevada Desert, I expected to feel homesick for a view of water. But with no water in sight for miles, it's surprisingly stunning, far more beautiful than a desert should be. In my mind, a desert should be a wilderness of nothing, a blank canvas for the Gods or man to write on, with nothing in it, except the Gods. Although man hasn't written on this canvas yet, the Gods desert design is sooo creative.

Sand-dunes rise and fall like irregular camels' humps. Mountain ranges are low peaks, or single mountainous lumps jutting from the ground. Each peak or mountain has its own sections and shapes in shades of vibrant red, green, white, blue, yellow, or purple, often with horizontal stripes of a contrasting colour.

Shifting sunlight sifts shadows across the sands. Each minute colourful clefts, rifts, and fissures fizz to a different shade. Rows of intriguing irregular mountains stand behind each other like infantry battalions in the Lord of the Rings. The more distant the art-full armies, the more they shroud in mists, murkiness, and mysteries.

Nightfall saw the only life-force. Three black shapes darted fast between and behind brown desert scrub, slightly scary, like evil spirits darting out of the way of goodness, cunningly coming closer, seeking an opening to attack. Such small packs of coyotes, bigger than foxes, hunt small children below 3 years old. Yet coyotes fit the landscape like jigsaw pieces of the right shape and colour. They offset nature's nudity with needed, natural strategies of survival. In their clever way, coyotes are perfect companions to the Lord of the Rings mysterious mountains.

The Nevada Desert has an aura of ancient times. It's a photographer's paradise, an artist's ambiguous delight, a place on Earth made for imaginative wonder of how the Gods could dream such beauty. It's a place I recommend visiting, with an open mind, and a camera.

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Author

See my weird-but-true first blog post on December 1st 2011, for an overview of my polymath, joyful and horrid fairy tale life. Taste the yummy, Godly, disgusting and loving ingredients of future posts - all truthful, with just a little artistic licence.

If writing is the fruit of sin, I must have sinned greatly. Otherwise how was I cured after decades of being 80% disabled; how did I earn merits at a university creative writing course for poetry, fiction and non-fiction; and how did I travel and lecture on TV and radio internationally? I must surely have sinned in wonderfully fun ways.